


mayerling.

by hilarions



Category: D.Gray-man
Genre: Alternate Universe - Ballet, Idol Worship, M/M, One-Sided Attraction, Underage Sex, an exploration of dubious relationships
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-12
Updated: 2018-08-12
Packaged: 2019-06-26 06:42:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,062
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15657873
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hilarions/pseuds/hilarions
Summary: "If Nijinsky saw you dance he’d fall in love on the spot."Link couldn’t stop himself from asking, couldn’t stop the question of, “What about Balanchine?” bubbling past his lips.Tyki stopped, and looked at him. A clever, evaluating glance shot from the corner of his sly eyes. “Balanchine looked for something else,” he said, plain and simple, no intention to be cruel. “He wanted charisma,” he said, flicking his cigarette to the ground and kicking up sparks when he scraped it out beneath his heel. “Uniqueness.”George Balanchine treated the New York City Ballet as a fiefdom, and counteddroit du seigneuramong his rights as co-founding director. His legacy counts relationships and marriages to his own students and protégés, and such an underbelly of culture existed within ballet long before his time — and continued long after.To Howard Link, Tyki Mikk embodied everything Balanchine represented. He was a king, of sorts, or a god, and to be chosen by him would be an honor beyond compare. He would do anything to become Mikk's Tanaquil LeClercq.





	mayerling.

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hurryup](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hurryup/gifts).



Link wondered sometimes if the word _balletomane_ was one reserved for those who did not pursue dance, but still found themselves enamoured with it. He wondered, should that not be the case, if it was something which classified all dancers too — considering, after all, that it took more than a flight of fancy and intrigue on a whim to dedicate one’s life to the art. It was obsession.

Madness.

Balleto- _mane._

He had often dreamed of the Royal British Ballet. Closed his eyes in too-small classes camped out in multi-purpose halls and performed _port de bras_ before an audience of imagined mirrors spanning the far wall, pretended he could hear his underqualified teacher’s voice morph into the accented poise of certainty Anita Everinoff commanded because even then Link had known he’d deserved better. So frustrated with blameless misfortune that it made him want to scream.

Too polite to say it, though.

Too realistic.

Too ashamed of his own pride and the way his aspiration outgrew and eclipsed him to his peers. But that was just the way things were. A simple truth. He cared more, he worked harder, he saw further, he danced _better._

Better than any of them in that run-down, second-rate, no-name class lost somewhere amidst the twining streets of Berlin. Unheardof, unseen. The idea that he might never be seen — that he would fade into obscurity the same way his first _die Lehrerin_ had — clung to him like a prophecy of his own pathetic future.

Better than any of them when it came to poise, schooling, command of his body, control of his movement. But Link was not someone lucky enough to be born with ballet in his bones, dancing steps like muscle memory of a past life spent as protege to Nureyev, or Nijinsky. Not the way Tokusa was.

Tokusa was sharp and talented, and had a manner of picking things up altogether too quickly, but he sustained an air about him as though he took classes simply because he happened upon them. That he practiced simply because he couldn’t conceive of anything more interesting to make of his time. He looked most days as though he’d wandered through the doors by accident, and consistently continued to do so for the next eight years of his life.

Link supposed he ought to give him more credit, but nothing about Tokusa’s lazy scorn and uninspired drawl set Link to believe he had desire for credit of any type. There was no applause, for him. No curtain call. He didn’t have a second glance spared for some Lincoln Kirstein. Frankly, it seemed more that he danced simply to flaunt how easily he could surpass those who tried.

Effortless success.

Link almost despised him.

Talent without ambition was frivolous, and wasted on him.

Tokusa had meandered into the scouting auditions hosted by the chief director of the New York City Ballet — by Malcolm Leverrier _himself —_ much the same way he’d walked into classes every day of his life. As though he’d simply found himself there entirely by accident. Link wasn’t even certain Tokusa had known what he was auditioning for, but was remarkably unsurprised all the same that he too was offered a scholarship.

They, and only three other sixteen-year-olds across Germany.

For all Link’s talent, for all his fevered dreams and aspirations, he had been powerless. Trapped. Iron-cast shoes sunk deep in the cloying, clinging, sucking mud of the misfortune of his inherited, cast-off circumstances.

In Berlin, he would have wasted away and become pathetic and died. He’d never been particularly happy about it, but never allowed himself the opportunity to mourn it. It had always been his inalienable reality that he would never, ever be seen — until the very moment Malcolm Leverrier’s eyes fell on him. Cold, dark, evaluating; as friendly and powerful both as a mongoose crouched beneath the stairs. Vicious patience in waiting, waiting, for a snake to slither by.

Watching Link, and watching him, and waiting to see if his performance would be worth his time.

Malcolm Leverrier had the power to give Link what he knew — what he’d always selfishly known — he deserved.

Link had always, since that day, cherished that perfection came so naturally to him, because it was perfection alone that roused Malcolm Leverrier’s satisfaction.

On the train to London Link had asked Tokusa, who didn’t care and never had and didn’t know and would never understand the way Link’s skin broke in his shoes to spark Malcolm Leverrier’s appetite and stained the cream canvas with blood he hadn’t managed to scrub off, “Why did you audition?” Something vile and sour was going rancid in his stomach. Something like the festerings of hatred. Injury tempting infection to ooze toxic and rotten through Link’s veins.

Tokusa had his feet propped up onto the harsh velour of the seat beside Link’s, effectively blocking any exit he might have liked to make for the aisle running down the length of the car. Scuffed, torn tennis shoes ground dirt into the tacky pattern of worn-out train seats.

He worked the hard candy in his mouth from one cheek to the other without looking up from his phone. “Thought you’d get lonely,” was what he said, patronising and non-committal, as though he hadn’t just committed to leaving the city, and the country, and the continent for something he didn’t even seem to be particularly interested in. He scrolled a lazy thumb along the screen and didn’t offer Link the courtesy of a glance when he reasoned, “You’re real shit at making friends.”

 

* * *

 

Malcolm Leverrier escorted them to the Royal Opera House. He was to conduct some sort of ballet-niche political treatise with Sheryl Camelot, and they were to whet their palates for what awaited them in New York. Join classes, forge networks, watch productions for all of five days before leaving Heathrow for another country. Another planet.

Another world.

Everyone had their idol. Their muse. Their Lynn Seymour and their Nadezhda von Meck. It wasn’t beyond the realm of reason to draw inspiration from art, and from the middle-back of a theatre hushed beneath the marvel of the Royal Ballet’s Orchestra cascading desperation and panic and terror and desire in such a way as only Tchaikovsky could, Link first saw his Balanchine in _grande jeté_ dancing Matthew Bourne’s steps in a beastial subjugation of tenderness offered only in moments missed, to be snatched back with a verocity such that Link found his own fingertips pressed to his cheek, eyes wide, heart trembling as though he’d been struck.

He and Tokusa and those three other students were carried backstage on the wings of presidential passes, whisked into the professional world under the arm of Malcolm Leverrier. It was quick, it was busy, it was a flurry of curtain calls, and through the sweat glistening at his throat and the powerful heave of his lungs, Tyki Mikk — black arrow painted down his dark brow to pin the line of his nose — still had the breath to offer a wide smile and envelop Link’s hand in both of his and promise, _I look forward to seeing one of you fill my shoes,_ in such a way that had him short of breath, head spinning still by the time they’d met with the principals and slipped out the back door, the busy world in the wings resounding in the immediate, hollow rumble of a London backstreet.

It smelled of cigarettes and urine and damp, rancid rubbish, and early autumn crept cold fingers beneath their collars, but Howard Link’s cheeks kept as warm as the hand that had been grasped by Tyki Mikk.

His Balanchine, and everything that entailed.

“Big shoes,” Road had said, with a sharp, nasty wink.

“Not big enough,” Tokusa retorted, sly and candid.

Link swallowed against the awkward lump in his throat and didn’t bother to scold their vulgarity. Certain his voice wouldn’t hold. He was Tamara Geva and Tanaquil LeClercq and Tyki Mikk, from that moment, was his Balanchine.

Link had often dreamed of the Royal British Ballet. For Sergeyev and Macmillan, and Nureyev and Fonteyn, and above all, above all, above _everything,_ for Tyki Mikk.

Tyki Mikk, who took the stage as the RBB’s first soloist in perhaps the most illustrious way; a leaked video of him dancing _Marguerite et Armand_ in a practice hall, lithe body twining half-taboo choreography with principal Lulu Lustol.

That choreography — and that video, certainly — had never been meant for anyone’s eyes. It was not staged for an audience, the way their arms wove around each other’s adoring bodies in a display so private that Link had taken a moment when the leak was made (maybe four years ago, now) to stop watching and look away, and wonder if it would be wrong of him to see it through to the end.

The kiss they shared, Lustol sitting by Mikk’s supine body, had been written only for Fonteyn and Nureyev, and they performed it only for themselves. Mikk’s dark hands on her pale back, tracing her shoulders, mapping her face, impassioned breaths caught between gasping lips that left Link’s heart racing, cheeks pink with mortification, with embarrassment at seeing something clearly not meant for him to see. Drowning in each other such that he was half certain they’d lost all thought of the piece they were performing, and was half a moment away from closing the tab on his riot of confliction before she fell away from his kiss, his embrace, floated out of reach, _en pointe_ like a spirit, or a ghost, or a fae light as air, and left his hand solitary. Alone. _Désolé._  

Lost, and absolutely, inarguably in love.

They had become their roles in each others arms, and from the conflict of outrage and adoration that arose, Tyki Mikk had been cast to be Lulu Lustol’s Solor in the Ballet’s next-season production of _La Bayadére._

It was a success like they hadn’t seen in years.

At the hotel, after _Swan Lake_  — after meeting Tyki Mikk, and having his voice shudder through Link’s fingertips — Link dug a book from his suitcase and let the pages fall open. A single polaroid photograph sat between them; one of the few things Link had brought with him, and one of the fewer things he allowed himself to cherish.

Taken backstage of the Royal Ballet’s _La Bayadére,_ 2013\. A candid shot of Mikk — of Solor — watching the stage from the wings. Gorgeously tender, in profile. Eyes only on his bayadére.

It was no secret to anyone who had seen the stolen video which had granted him the role (some five million people — one of those curiosities of happenstance that caught the world’s fleeting attention) that he’d had a short, whirlwind affair with his Nikiya that season. For the publicity of their short relationship — should it be called that, Link didn’t think he’d ever know — it was often brought up in interviews. Prying questions which Mikk effortlessly rebuffed to use as a platform to acknowledge her, and address his absolute respect for her.

Lying awake in that hotel room, sleeplessly thumbing through links of admonishments that reposts had been deleted on copyright grounds as he searched for the original leak, Link found a rare clip of a filmed interview.

 _We were artists,_ Mikk said, and hesitated, a smile fracturing his abashed laugh. Link was absolutely unable to tear his eyes away. _Uhm,_ he hazarded, roguishly embarrassed, _I don’t know what more to say. We were dancing… intimately passionate roles. Two characters who were deeply in love with one another. I think it’s only natural that we fell in love too, for a short while._

He listened to Tyki Mikk again, and then again and again until he knew the perfect cadence of his voice, the brook-like flow of his almost-accented English, and held the polaroid to the light of his phone’s screen, as though to match his words with the honesty of adoration captured in flash. More than anything, to Link, he looked like a man who’d designed himself to fall in love, over and again, with whoever he needed to fall in love with.

 

* * *

 

That week spent in classes with the Royal Ballet was everything Link had dreamed for himself. Halls filled with dancers of his caliber — dancers who he could aspire to transcend. Practice studios like carbon copies of the one Tyki Mikk had danced _Marguerite et Armand_ in with Lulu Lustol — slate grey floors, mirrors lining the walls. The functionality of a building created purely for ballet, and a sweeping grandeur to match the class of the art they practiced.

For the first time in his life, Link felt as though he could breathe deeply, and certainly. Chest loose and relieved, he’d lost the trepidatious caution that if he pulled the rancid, stagnant air of Berlin too far into his lungs, it would atrophy him from the inside out.

In the classes he stood guest at — in _all_ the classes Link stood guest at, there was someone he undoubtedly couldn’t help but notice. Frail and wispish and pale as a ghost, Link might have been inclined to murmur a hushed question as to whether the halls were haunted.

It wasn’t until Link saw Allen Walker partnering with Road in _Adagio_ that he felt certain he could place him as, well, a _he._ He was slender and elegant and lighter-than-air in a way that was demanded more of ballerinas than danseurs, and Link wasn’t sure, entirely, what to make of him.

He looked sick.

Not in the way he moved, or the inarguable strength in his unsupposing body, but his skin was so pale he almost looked like a corpse, not helped one bit by the bleach-white of his hair, or the translucent grey of his eyes. Despite his talent — effortlessly gorgeous when he danced in a way Link couldn’t tear his eyes from, in a way that put even Tokusa to shame — the only thing that lead Link to believe he was even real was the unhappy, ugly, and entirely uncharacteristic marring of scars that rotted across the left side of his face, and down his arm.

He might have been pretty — and he was (in an otherworldly, dead sort of way) — if not for the disfigurement. He might have been successful.

Link pitied him.

All the talent in the world, all the ambition he might have, wasted on a face not built for the stage.

(It didn’t occur to him until much later that Allen’s talent might not have been god-given but something he worked for, tirelessly, every day of his life, because he _was_ dead, in a way, and had nothing but ballet left in him, and a dancer without an audience was like pointe shoes in a museum, and if being scarred and disfigured and ugly meant he had to become the best, the absolute best, to even be given a chance, then he would die for it all over again, and again, and again, because he didn’t _have_ anything else, and nothing else was worth his pathetic life.)

“Hey!” Allen caught up with him in the hall, and Link almost expected his slender hand to pass right through Link’s shoulder, as though insubstantial.

It didn’t, and Link stepped quickly away from the touch. “Hello,” he said, curt, suspicious, eyes darting between Allen’s as though trying very consciously to decide which to look at so as not to appear to be staring — or, perhaps, to be too pointedly ignoring the thick, gnarled scar that bisected his brow and sliced down his cheek.

Allen Walker at a distance made Link noticeably uncomfortable.

Allen Walker standing in front of him smiling a wide, awful smile made of plastic and filigree silver was enough to make Link want to turn tail and run. That close, Link was certain that more than the scars, his eyes were the most unnerving thing about him.

Trying to look at them felt like trying to squint through misted glass, and being looked at by them felt less of an upfront exchange and more as though someone was peeking at Link from between blinds, the hair on the back of his neck standing on end.

He tried his absolute best not to visibly bristle, and enlisted every shred of control to maintain Allen’s gaze. As difficult as that was, it would be disgustingly rude of Link to turn his cheek, and he was at that moment representing Malcolm Leverrier, and the New York City Ballet — despite never having stepped foot in the United States.

“You’re with Road and Tokusa, right?” Allen demanded, exuberance bubbling like stale champagne, that disquieting smile still stretched across his face.

Link nodded, short and stern, before realising that would probably be quite rude. Unsticking his frozen jaw, he forced himself to say, “Yes.” He had intended to say more, but couldn’t quite bring himself to. Not to Allen’s opaque eyes and bright, wrong smile.

“Howard, right?” he prompted, amusement failing, smile turning brighter. More forced. Sitting all wrong on his face.

“Link,” he corrected.

“Right,” Allen agreed. He seemed to say that a lot. “Right, Link. Sorry,” he laughed, bright and self-abasing, as though apologising for a stupid mistake. “Well,” he proposed, “we’re going out to get some lunch — the three of us,” he added, as though that wasn’t clear, “and I was wondering if you’d like to join. Hoping, actually,” he amended with another sparkling, polished-glass laugh.

“Uhm,” Link articulated, and let his eyes slip away for a moment, glancing around as though for an excuse, and allowed himself the moment to take another step back. “No, thank y-”

“He’d _love_ to,” Tokusa announced, all but winding Link with the arm he draped heavily around his shoulders. “Right, Howie?”

“No,” Link backpedaled with a tight, panicked smile, ducking out from under his arm. “No, really, I should get back to-”

“Fawning over Tyki Mikk?” Tokusa mocked, his smile absolutely awful and dripping with mockery, and still somehow more pleasant to look at than Allen’s. “Give it a rest, would you? Or, better yet,” he proposed, “stalk him in person. We’re in London, after all. For all we know, he could be behind any one of these doors.”

“Tyki Mikk?” Allen repeated, the smile falling a little from his face before he hoisted it back up. A painting on a wall. “I’m his understudy,” he said, looking right at Link as he said it. “If you want to meet him, I can-”

 _“No,”_ Link refused, vehement and appalled, and could feel his cheeks turning hot with shame. “No, thank you, but I really have to go,” he said, firmer than intended to perhaps hide the spark of fear that had lit up in the pit of his stomach, and immediately turned on his heel to stride away — quick, hurried, the closest he would allow himself to running.

Allen Walker, there was no doubt, was absolutely _terrifying._

And, besides. Link didn’t need Tokusa to tell him where to find Tyki Mikk. They Royal Opera House was, after all, right next door. His next performance of _Swan Lake_ wasn’t scheduled until nine that night, and it was only then coming to mid-afternoon. Dancers weren’t put on hold the moment a production took to the stage — that would be disastrous for their performance — and so it was that Mikk would be in the last of his rehearsals for the day before being granted a few hours’ respite and taking to the stage once more.

Not so much for another chance to meet him, Link slipped through the twisting, turning corridors of the Opera House — not sure, entirely, where he should be looking. Not so much for another chance to meet him, but for another chance to see him.

To _see_ him.

“Hey,” Allen called behind him, again, and Link tried not to flinch with the way he twisted on his heel to face him, skin prickling and defensive. Allen’s smile was small this time, and wry, and held none of the performative excitement of before. “It’s this way,” he said, quiet and removed, and when he stepped past his cool fingers slipped between Link’s to take his hand and lead him through the dusty halls.

Link’s breaths were careful, and he was all too aware of the texture of Allen’s smooth hand, and the way he seemed even less alive than ever with his touch as cold as a corpse. Regardless, he didn’t say anything. Didn’t pull away. Let Allen Walker lead him deep into the muted, muffled halls of the Opera, not one of them sharing a word.

He swallowed back questions of Tokusa and Road — in honesty, he didn’t really care. Not enough to force his way through having a conversation with Allen. Cold hand light and loose around his, Link was struck with the distinct thought that an Opera House would be the perfect place for a Wilis to haunt. Halls filled to bursting with men filled to bursting with infidelity and loveless desire, each and every one of them prepared to dance themselves to death.

Happy to.

Link wondered, without much fear, if Allen was going to kill him. If it was just in his nature. Through no fault of Allen’s, the disquieted prickling between Link’s shoulders told him that death was a close friend. He was relieved, here, that Allen had given up on smiling as though to mask his air of misfortune. There was a modesty to his unsurprised acquiescence and sad curl of his lips that Link could respect more than a performer’s smile.

His fingers were slowly warming against Link’s, and Link wondered if he was coming back to life, or simply dragging Link closer to death.

“Here,” Allen said, voice at home with the dust and whispers of the Opera halls, and lifted himself in a thoughtless _relevé_ to peer through the window fronting the door. Elegant, perfect, and all without intention, Link wondered what it was about Allen that made him seem so absolutely unreal. Tried to place what it was about him that made him seem more of a shadow than anything, or a ghost.

Allen’s fingers tightened briefly around Link’s, and he glanced a query over his shoulder.

 _Are you going to look?_ he seemed to ask.

 _I wonder,_ Link thought, letting himself be lured closer. _If I accept the fae’s gift, will I ever pay back the debt and regain my freedom?_

Tyki Mikk was on the other side of the glass, and all consideration of whether or not he could return Allen’s favour was completely and absolutely forgotten for the realisation that he couldn’t.

Of course he couldn’t.

Nothing would ever compare to the gift of watching Tyki Mikk dance, and that was simply a fact.

Without a programme before him Link had no name to put to the steps being performed, and the music that filtered beneath the door was too faint to make out. Tchaikovsky or Stravinsky, Link didn’t know. Petipa or Macmillan. He assumed, with a little bit of thought, it wouldn’t be so difficult to piece together.

He wasn’t much of a mind to be thinking about anything, right then, but the way Tyki moved.

Supple, prowling, all the grace of a Dane and all the showmanship of a Balanchine. He only seemed to be half-performing, illustrating a few bars of choreography before whirling around to speak, lips moving, teeth flashing, eyes bright and enraptured. He slipped in and out of characters like water, and the expression of his body never once fell flat. A stage charisma that never faltered, despite that he didn’t know he had an audience beyond the partner of his _pas de deux_ and the production’s director, watching them dance.

“He’s going to be a choreographer,” Allen murmured, half-watching with Link, “almost definitely. He likes performing well enough, but he’s got too much vision to settle for being just one part of a production.”

Link’s heart was thrumming beneath his fingertips, right under his skin. Watching Tyki Mikk in rehearsal, he felt as though he’d gotten away with something. Peered beneath the curtain and found a secret. Face kept inscrutable, Link traced his fingertips along the lip of the window, and caught black-grey dust on his skin.

“If you like,” Allen said, hand only just turning warm around Link’s, “I can take you to watch him again, tonight.”

Allen’s eyes were more like mirrors than windows. Polished silver. Link could see himself reflected in them perfectly, and couldn’t see anything of Allen at all. He swallowed - swallowed back a question of _why._

A short nod. Sharp with appreciation he didn’t know how to voice.

Allen smiled like he was glad, or relieved. He smiled like a sigh that was phrased less in the curl of his lips so much as the way his shoulders settled and his chin lifted, and his eyes lost some of that glassy courtesy. His lukewarm fingers tightened briefly around Link’s hand, and Link looked back into the studio.

He stood watching Tyki Mikk’s rehearsal for longer than he should have, and with him watching Mikk, Link could feel Allen watching him.

 

* * *

 

Indebted for what Allen gave to him, Link didn’t let himself resist the things Allen took from him in exchange. Heart racing for Tyki Mikk on the stage before them, a performance beyond what should have been possible, he let Allen warm his cold fingers against Link’s, and let Allen press his lonely corpse lips to Link’s, and let Allen wind his empty arms around Link’s shoulders.

His hollow body pressed against Link’s in the early autumn of London and the layered dust of the Royal Ballet, and Link was left with the strange sensation of being made to watch something he didn’t particularly want to be party to. Something strange and uncomfortable, as though he were standing away from himself and watching Allen embrace his own shadow.

He might have been jealous of Allen and the way he left Link alone with that unsavoury shadow of his to go meet with Tyki Mikk after the show. He might have been jealous of him, if he weren’t so pitying.

So viscerally sickened by the way Sheryl Camelot took Allen’s hand the way Allen took Link’s and pulled him off course, and caught Allen’s chin in an unquestionable demand that Allen didn’t bother to resist.

Link wondered if it was a curse, more than death, that Allen carried around with him. One he couldn’t shed, and could only pass on to someone like Link.

 _I gave you what you wanted,_ the director of the Royal British Ballet seemed to tell Allen — Allen seemed to tell Link. _So now I own you._

The difference was, Allen didn’t seem to take any pleasure in the power he held over Link.

The difference was, when Allen kissed Link it felt like he was on the verge of mania, on the verge of tears, on the verge of having a scream torn from his throat. When Allen kissed Link, it felt like he was inches from death, and desperate to find something worth keeping him alive.

It felt like he was pleading with Link — begging him.

 _Love me,_ he seemed to say, his whole body made of glass one breath from shattering apart. _I need you to fall in love with me._

 

* * *

 

Link wasn’t sure if they were dating, and didn’t really want to know. He didn’t really want to think about it.

It was their last day in London, and Link didn’t particularly want to be dating Allen Walker. The last thing he wanted, moving forward — moving to New York — was to be carrying around thoughts of Allen Walker.

They were never very pleasant thoughts.

“I like you,” Allen said, his head resting on Link’s legs, “but I don’t know if I _actually_ like you.” The bed in Allen’s dorm was narrow, and shoved up against the wall to create the illusion of space in an equally narrow room. His legs curled a little with the way he laughed. Curling and shifting. Mussing the already-messy blankets of his bed. “Sorry,” he said, that odd, helpless laughter tumbling between his words, “sorry. That sounds pretty awful out loud,” he said, and reached a hand up to brush his fingers through the tail of Link’s braid. “What I mean is — what do I mean?” he mused, and didn’t seem to be talking to Link at all. “Well, I suppose I don’t really know you,” he reasoned, and dragged his fingertip along the band tying off Link’s hair the same way Link would drag his fingertip across the dusty sill of a window.

“I don’t even know if there’s anything to know,” Allen said, eyes on his fingers, “or if you’re just hollow, empty, and I’ve filled you up with all the things I think I’d like about you, if I knew you. I don’t know,” he said, his words trembling with another laugh. “I don’t really know what I’m saying,” he admitted as it tumbled out.

Link was glad when Allen dropped his hand away, relieved when he let his arm fall to cover his eyes.

“It’s pretty odd, huh,” he continued, and Link was much more fond of watching his lips frame words than he was of listening to them. Allen talked a lot like this — rambling, meandering half-formed trains of thought running round in circles. Mostly, Link thought Allen didn’t believe Link was listening to him. It didn’t really bother Link either way. He didn’t know how to take any of what Allen said to heart. “I don’t know,” he hummed, sighed. “I do like you, though,” he said, and Link was struck again with the disquieting feeling that Allen wasn’t talking to him so much as through him. “I really do. I like that you let me kiss you. You’re pretty,” he said, “and talented, and you let me kiss you. Usually,” he added, another loose, strange laugh tumbling out of him, “usually the people that kiss me aren’t very pretty — or young, for that matter.”

"I'm older than you," Link said. He felt the need to remind Allen of that. Like Allen had gotten lost somewhere amongst all his experiences, and assumed he was older than he was. "I'm almost two years older than you."

“I don’t know… I don’t know,” he said like he hadn't heard, or wasn't listening, and lifted his arm to peer up at Link with those mirror eyes. “I feel like…” he considered, and he was looking right at Link when he spoke, “like you’re a tin soldier, or a wind-up bird.”

The only thing Link hated more than the way Allen looked through him was the feeling that came with when Allen looked _at_ him. It was absolutely repulsive. Link felt as though he was being looked at by himself, in those mirror-eyes of Allen’s, and he hated it.

“Yeah,” Allen said, a small, satisfied smile curling onto his pretty lips. “Yeah, a wind-up bird.” He closed his eyes again, and Link breathed a quiet sigh. “I feel like I could say anything and it wouldn’t really matter to you,” he murmured, like those trailing threads of meandering thought had him all tangled up and he didn’t quite know how he was meant to escape his own mind. “Hey, Link,” he hummed, eyes closed, “this is probably an odd question — you might not like it much — but what do you think you’d do if I died?”

Link wondered briefly, looking out at Allen’s dorm because he didn’t really want to look at Allen, if he could get away with not answering at all. “I don’t know,” he said, because he really didn’t want to think about it. Not that the idea of Allen Walker dying made him feel any particular way — or, perhaps simply _because_ it didn’t. “I don’t know you that well,” he reasoned, pragmatic and bland, “so I don’t know if I’d do anything.”

It was a bit much to expect anything of him, wasn’t it?

“Do you want to?”

Link blinked down at him, surprised. His eyes were open, and looking up at Link, and they were startlingly clear. “Sorry?” Link asked, never quite prepared for those odd moments when Allen truly seemed to be in something of his right mind.

“Do you want to know me more,” Allen repeated, looking up at him. Unblinking. Disconcerting.

Link didn’t particularly want to know more about Allen than was strictly necessary. “I’m not sure,” he said, which in his esteem was as good as a no.

But Allen sat up off Link’s lap and kneeled on the narrow bed beside him. “I’ll show you,” he said, and it didn’t sound like _I’ll give you what you want_ so much as _you owe me, remember?_

Link didn’t say a word when Allen reached out a hand to trace his fingertips across Link’s cheek. Collecting dust off a window sill. He didn’t say anything when Allen leaned in to kiss him. Cold dead lips on his, pale lashes fluttering against pallid cheeks.

Hands caressed down the line of Link’s neck, settled in a delicate flare of skin and bone across his shoulders, a cage of spider lilies keeping him still. He could break free all too easily, he knew. Kept in place only because to do so would be to bruise the petals, break the stems. Allen kept him prisoner with the delicacy of his bonds, knowing Link didn’t have the heart to break them.

Allen sat over Link’s lap, straddled his legs, and Link’s hands fell to his slim hips more for want of anything better to do than as any kind of encouragement. His tongue traced Link’s lip, coy and sly, and Link’s stomach turned at the warmth of it. Not quite able to come to terms with the idea that Allen could be anything but cold.

Uncomfortable at the thought of Allen being real, and alive.

That someone like him could truly exist.

He pulled away, eyes still closed, to lift his shirt over his head. His back was a perfect baletic arch, and Link’s wary fingers traced up the dip of his spine.

There wasn’t an ounce of fat on him — as though someone had trimmed him down with a sharp, fine knife and carved his body into the perfect vessel for ballet. The same way ballerinas would hack at their pointe shoes to make their ideal. Slammed between a door and frame to tenderise his sharp edges, scars torn into his skin for traction. Ballet had turned his body into something alien, and strange.

He was beautiful, in a very textbook sense, and Link figured he was probably meant to be aroused.

He wasn’t.

Allen Walker, to him, embodied the sexless tragedy of ballet. Idealism and death, and untouchable beauty. Untouchable. On a stage, he would be beyond captivating. He would be mesmerising. He would be the star of their generation — of that, Link was certain.

But to get there — to get there, he had to pay his debt to Sheryl Camelot, and whoever else he might owe. If Link were to let himself understand Allen, he would understand the panic in the way his teeth scraped at Link’s lips, the desperation in the way he slipped between Link’s legs and took him in his mouth. He might understand the pain, and the fear. The absolute _need,_ to have it mean something — to have it be worth something. To know he wasn’t just paying empty wages to a hand that would never be satisfied with what he gave, or what was taken by force.

Link didn’t let himself understand. He didn’t want to understand Allen. He was scared of him, and scared of the world that had created him, and didn’t want to think about where fear like the kind that had him shedding his clothes and seating himself on Link’s erection might come from.

He wasn’t really hard, though he sort of tried for Allen’s sake. For pity, more than anything. He certainly wasn’t hard enough to call it anything perfunctory, the way Allen forced his body to accept Link’s unwilling penance, but through it all — through Allen riding him with the determination of toned, artistic thighs and the way his hands clung to Link’s shirt and the way his lips passed heavy breaths like whispered sobs against Link’s, Link was thinking that, scars or no scars (he’d almost forgotten, by then, that Allen had scars at all, he’d gotten so used to seeing them), he really was very pretty.

Not pretty in a way that made Link want to touch him the way Allen was asking him to, but in a removed, vague, esoteric sort of way. Scars and all, Allen Walker was a work of art — and not one made to be touched.

Pointe shoes in a museum, beaten down and ugly, and filled with all the reverent adoration that was demanded of something Pavlova had danced in, or Fonteyn.

His body was a conduit for talent, gathering a layer of dust. Unloved, untouched, adored.

 _Sylvie Guillem wore those,_ they might say, _when she performed Manon._

They weren't much use behind glass, though, were they _._

Allen kept his face buried against Link’s neck, as though hiding. As though he didn’t want to be seen at all. Link understood that, at least. This was not the kind of performance that Link wanted Allen to be famous for. That he wanted his name to be known for.

“Do you like it?” he asked, voice a complex twist of subtleties that Link didn’t particularly want to decypher, grinding down against Link’s hips.

Link caught his breath and tried to find something to enjoy about it. “Not really,” he admitted. His hands had never really moved from Allen’s hips and he was still sitting in the same place against the bed, back pressed against the wall. He hesitated another moment before asking, “Can we stop?”

“I guess,” Allen allowed. He didn’t particularly seem to know if he was meant to be relieved or offended. He didn’t seem to be anything at all, right then. He clambered off Link’s lap and bundled the blankets up over his naked body, and from Link’s periphery he didn’t even seem to really exist.

Like those mirror eyes of his had run out of things to reflect.

Link pulled his pants up and fiddled with the button of his fly, eyes on his hands. “Why did you ask me to do that?” he asked. It had felt more like an obligation, on both their parts, than anything.

Allen bit his lip, and twisted his fingers together. “I don’t know,” he said, knees pulled up to his chest. His slim, athletic body all folded up into nothing. “I want you to like me,” he said, and it sounded like he was looking through Link all over again. “That’s the only thing that people really like me for.”

Link’s mind drew up a picture of Sheryl Camelot and the way he took Allen’s hand the same way Allen took Link’s, and the way his fingers curled around Allen’s chin like a statement of possession. He thought about Tyki Mikk, and how Allen was his understudy, and how Allen always seemed to be on the wrong side of the door, or curtain, or glass.

“Does,” he started, and then stopped. Swallowed, and glanced away. “Does Mikk do that… to you?” he asked. Heart in his throat. Trying to imagine how he might feel to see Tyki Mikk catch Allen’s hand the way Allen took Link’s, or to kiss him the way Sheryl Camelot kissed him. Breaths too shallow, quiet, he shifted his legs. Delayed reaction to having Allen’s warm tongue lick up the underside of his cock.

“Tyki?” Allen laughed, charmed. “No,” he said, and shook his head, “never. I sort of asked him once,” he admitted. “You know, if he wanted to. He just looked mad. Furious.”

“Do you think…” Link trailed, slow, dragged his hands forcefully down his thighs, “you’d like it? If he did?”

Allen didn’t say anything for a long moment, and Link glanced aside at him from the corner of his eye. He seemed to be thinking about something, and Link staunchly averted his eyes. “Hey, you know,” he said at length, voice mulled over in that tone that Link instinctively discarded as foundless ramblings, and a quiet sigh breathed past his lips, “I think we’re pretty similar, Link. Not so much in the little ways — you’re far more mature, and you care about rules and being respectful and saying the right thing, and I’m not very good with any of that — but I think… I think we’re pretty similar,” he repeated, and Link wasn’t sure if he missed Allen’s clarity, or if he was glad it was gone, or if Allen wasn’t actually lost at all and Link simply wasn’t listening. “If I can fill you up with all the things I’d like to like about someone,” Allen said, “I think you would probably do the same for me. Don’t you think?”

Link shook his head, and another silent sigh slipped past his lips. “I don’t understand,” he said.

Allen laughed — a sweet, coquettish giggle, pretty as polished glass. “You really are like a wind-up bird, Link,” he said, nodding emphatic agreement with his last round of musings. “Have you heard about that?” he asked. “The more I think about it the more right it seems. It’s a clockwork bird,” he explained, despite Link never giving any inclination of asking, “whose job is to wind up reality every morning. And when weird things happen — when the world changes, and reality needs a lot of fixing to seem normal again, it’s the wind-up bird who makes sure everything settles into place properly.”

He breathed a quiet, happy sigh, as though relieved to have said it — as though relieved that in saying it, it somehow became true. His voice turned low and quiet, and absolutely insubstantial. “You make me feel really calm, Link,” he said, and Link didn’t look at him when he dropped his head to rest on Link’s shoulder. This poor, naked creature beside him. “Like I could be thrown off the face of the earth for no reason at all and you would be there, and you would just explain that this is what’s happening now, and there’s no reason to get flustered over it. Honestly,” he said, and Link felt Allen turn his head to press his lips to his shoulder, “since you’ve been here I don’t think I’ve ever felt as calm. Isn’t that odd?” he prompted without any real expectation of Link acknowledging him. “I feel like anything, absolutely anything could happen at all,” he whispered, breaths caught hot and real and alive in the cotton of Link’s shirt, “and it would all be perfectly alright.”

 

* * *

 

Link wondered if he ought to be afraid of flying. It made sense that he should be, he supposed, having never flown before, or ever having any interest in flying.

As it turned out, he was too distracted by the discomfort of a transatlantic flight to work up the concern of being _on_ a transatlantic flight. Cramped, stifled, the recycled air caught in his throat and Link figured it was only polite to mind his own business and keep as quiet as possible. By the time they’d taken off a dull pain had already settled in his temple, wound there by his jaw locked tight against poised frustration with the way some few did not seem to understand that the only way for all of them to withstand such sardine-type conditions for the next eight hours was to be absolutely silent and pretend they were somewhere else entirely.

From his carry-on pack Link made to pull out a bottle of water and packet of aspirin, and frowned to find something unfamiliar and unexpected jostle against his unwary fingers. Confused, he pulled it out.

A book — a novel. Battered and rumpled and decidedly not his. Link glanced around cautiously, as though to determine if he’d picked up someone else’s bag. But, in his hand was his water, and his aspirin, and the tag hanging from the zip bore his name. Absolutely confounded, Link turned the book over in his hands, thumbed the frayed, curling paperback covers. _The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle._ He let it fall open to a well-worn page of its choice, and the cracked spine settled on something close to the front.  

A card sat between the pages of one seventy and one seventy-one, and a blue-ink pen had been used to line a paragraph that stretched from the end of one across to the beginning of the other. The blank white card was inked in the same colour, and Link knew immediately, despite never having seen it before, that the sharp, arching handwriting belonged to Allen Walker.

_Eight hours is a long time to fill with nothing, Mr Wind-Up Bird._

That was all it said.

Brows digging deeper confusion, Link turned the card over as though looking for any other explanation. There wasn’t one, and he determinedly glanced over the lined excerpt for some sort of clue.

_I can hardly remember what my life has been like since then. I became a social studies teacher and taught geography and history in high school, but I was not, in the true sense of the word, alive. I simply performed the mundane tasks that were handed to me, one after another. I never had a single real friend, no human ties with the students in my charge. I never loved anyone. I no longer knew what it meant to love another person._

Link bit back his confusion and glanced up, around, as though expecting Allen Walker to manifest that Link might demand what he meant. Truly, Link did not understand him. He didn’t think he ever would. Even if he were given a whole lifetime dedicated to the enigma, Link doubted he’d ever understand him.

He looked down at the book in his hands, and thumbed his fingers along the blunt corners of the well-loved pages.

Link paused, and frowned. Perhaps not well-loved. Somehow, this didn’t strike Link as the sort of book he was meant to love. One he was meant to hate, perhaps, and hate all the more for the fact he couldn’t help but return to it again and again, make notes and underline paragraphs, and thumb indexes of self-flagellation.

That, certainly, had seemed Allen’s abuse of the copy. It was not well-loved. It was battered and dirty and hated, and Link supposed he was right about one thing. He really did have nothing to fill his next eight hours with.

A quiet sigh slipped past Link’s lips, and he opened it to the first page.

It was difficult, the way it meandered seemingly pointless sequences of an odd, painfully mundane life — mundane, despite that every scene something morbidly nonsensical happened. It was incredibly strange, and left him feeling terribly uneasy for some reason he couldn’t piece together. Fitting that Allen Walker would leave him with such a gift; the book bore the same manner of setting Link on edge as he did, himself.

Missing cats turned to disappearing wives, strange phone calls and girls too young to be flattered. Wet dreams that were decidedly more discomforting than they were arousing. Link really didn’t know what Allen Walker expected him to do with such a book.

After several hours he stuck Allen’s card between the pages and let the book fall closed, his perplexed frown cast out the window.

It was exactly the same sight as he’d seen after they’d breached the cloud cover over London; even the sun hadn’t seemed to move. Still mid-afternoon.

Or, rather, the sun _had_ moved — it was more true that they were following it. Chasing it westward, that they were suspended within a single hour. Link’s heart thrummed and his stomach turned, uncomfortable. He looked down at the book in his lap — the book Allen Walker had given him. Breaths sitting uneasy in his chest, Link found himself very unhappy with the idea of being stuck inside that one frame of time, absolutely unchanged, with nothing but that book to keep him company.


End file.
